Your Ego Is An Idiot With A Label-Maker

Know yourself - don't define yourself. 

Labeling is the addiction of your Ego. Defining is like drawing a circle around yourself and saying I can not go further. 

We are constantly changing.  Our blood, our brains, our memories, our experiences. Every moment we are a new self. Every day we aren't who we were but who we are, and by the end of this sentence you will be a different you. 

Remember the moment, the phrase, the re-frame that you heard and instantly you were different and seeing the world through new eyes...

Defining yourself puts imaginary limits on real possibilities. 

Instead, commit to knowing yourself. Knowing yourself is investigatory, it requires curiosity. Since we are changing every day - we must do this every day to be able to say I know myself.  

Defining is the ego saying I am a writer. I am a woman. I am young.

Then you don't get the writing fellowship. You develop cancer and your lady bits get removed. You turn 40. (I personally have only had the first one happen to me.) You suffer, you are traumatized and then you make big life choices when you are depressed, detached, and fearful. 

No bueno. 

The ego is what produces anxiety and fear.  Fear of reality conflicting with your ego labels. You are a Writer so you have anxiety about writing because if you don't you are not a writer. 

If you do not label yourself a painter you will not have fear about painting because fuck it, you're not a painter, nothing is at stake, go ahead throw some paint on the canvas. 

That's when you produce your best work. 

If you want to create great art you must know yourself because all your characters/ painting/poems are fractured parts of your identity, your identity that is in constant development, and it is yourself you are putting on the page or canvas. The deepest universal truths of you, the dark shadows of societal repressions that perhaps only you are brave enough to throw up onto a screen so that others might look up and think I'm not the only one.

So stop limiting yourself. 

Screw your ego and it's label maker.  

If I wake and I sing, I sang. If I wake up and dance, I danced. If I paint, I paint.  Then when someone asks are you an artist I can answer...this morning I sang, danced and painted. Let them label you if their ego needs to. But don't let other peoples label makers guide your actions. 

Jess Hinds
The Crass Shaman